About the Chernobyl accident a lot of books have been written, as well as films and series that have been and are being shot about it. Adam Higginbotham's book is not just another account of events, but a detailed analysis of causes and effects, characters and events, the political situation and erroneous decisions. The plot of the book is based on interviews with surviving witnesses of the accident and their relatives, archival evidence and documents.
It seemed that misfortune came like a bolt from the blue, due to a chain of tragic accidents, but this is not so. The disaster was being approached step by step, slowly but surely. It was accompanied by a number of circumstances - imperfections in the design of the reactor, lack of understanding of the principles of its operation, secrecy among nuclear scientists around the world. Accidents happened not only in the USSR, and in the same way such accidents were tried to be hidden, despite obvious signs.
Nuclear power was born during the Second World War and initially served to create a superweapon, the action of which the whole world could see on the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Subsequently, when nuclear energy was used for peaceful purposes, the secrecy surrounding it continued to be maintained, so that many of those who directly serviced the reactors were not aware of their work. Soviet leaders of various ranks did not know about this, preferring to listen to the peppy reports of power engineers, who assured that the reactors were completely safe.
They learn from mistakes, but in the case of an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the price was too high. According to Higginbotham, nuclear reactors, especially water-graphite type, require special care, and ideally, the transition to a different type of reactor or a different type of electricity production. And, if Europe is trying hard to develop alternative energy sources - windmills and solar panels, then Russia and the USA are in no hurry to abandon their usual nuclear power plants - they need more power than small European countries. And despite all the precautions, there is no guarantee that such a tragedy will never happen again. The force that a person created and forced to serve is too great; the consequences of such carelessness are too quickly forgotten. Higginbotham's book once again reminds us of this reality.
